Microsoft and Cognizant Expand Strategic Alliance

This post is by Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President of the Data Group at Microsoft.

I am excited to announce that Microsoft and Cognizant are expanding their strategic alliance to bring the power of cloud analytics and big data to customers through Microsoft’s Cortana Analytics Suite and Cognizant’s BigDecisions Platform. Cognizant’s new advanced analytics platform – built on Azure – will help customers simplify and automate complex decision making, helping them gain greater business insights from their data and make smarter business decisions.

This announcement marks a significant expansion to our alliance with Cognizant and includes dedicated engineering resources from both companies to deliver the BigDecisions platform and business applications on Cortana Analytics. Through shared marketing, sales and engineering resources we will help enterprises deploy predictive analytics applications and services to uncover new business opportunities.

“Today’s digital businesses have access to an almost endless supply of valuable information generated by their customers, products, machines and devices – information that can provide enormous value and inform strategic decision making,” said Karthik Krishnamurthy, Senior Vice President and Global Business Leader, Analytics and Information Management at Cognizant. “The solutions we have today at Cognizant, and the deep collaboration with Microsoft, will enable our customers make smarter decisions, improve customer service and uncover new business possibilities faster than ever before.”

Many industries are going through a tremendous business disruption cycle and facing enormous pressures from new competitors and new business models that leverage insights from big data. Although businesses everywhere consume and produce vast amounts of data, finding actionable intelligence and insights from this data is typically very difficult and expensive. Leveraging the flexibility, scale and security of Azure, partners like Cognizant are using Cortana Analytics to build sophisticated industry solutions and are doing so in a way that’s faster, easier and more cost-effective. Cortana Analytics gives Cognizant access to state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms and the ability connect to a wide variety of structured or unstructured data types and sources.